Parkinsons Disease

Parkinsons Disease

The PSU Parkinson’s Foundation recently held its first fundraising effort to benefit Parkinson’s disease research at Penn State Hershey. Students and community members joined forces and promoted National Parkinson’s Awareness Month, educated attendees about the disease and also raised more than $1,200 at their Field Day for research.

Beginning Friday, March 14, Center Stage, an initiative of Penn State Hershey Medical Center and Penn State College of Medicine, and Lancaster-based Cobalt Dance Company will partner to offer a seven-week dance class for people with Parkinson's disease and their companions.

The internationally acclaimed program Dance for Parkinson’s will now be available to residents of central Pennsylvania thanks to a new collaboration among teaching artists from the nonprofit, Lancaster-based Contemporary Ballet of PA (COBALT) and the Penn State Hershey University Fitness Center, which will host the classes.

Penn State College of Medicine has just received a $3.9 million award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) of the National Institutes of Health for research to find biomarkers for Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is a chronic and progressive movement disorder that affects more than 1 million Americans. The five-year award is part of the Parkinson's Disease Biomarkers Program of the NINDS that is designed to find reliable markers that can be used in the future evaluation of novel therapies that may stop Parkinson's.

Professor Xuemei Huang of Penn State Hershey Medical Center has been an active researcher in this field. The new award will be based on recent results from her laboratory that suggest a novel way to detect Parkinson's related brain damage by using a commonly available clinical technique, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The Penn State College of Medicine Department of Pathology Visiting Professor Lecture Series will be held at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 13, in the Pathology Conference Room, C7702 on the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center campus. The guest lecturer Dr. Thomas Montine, Alvord Professor and interim chair, Department of Pathology, and adjunct professor of neurological surgery at the University of Washington, Seattle, Wash., will present "Therapeutic Targets for Diseases that Cause Dementia."

Sang-Min Lee, a graduate student at Penn State College of Medicine, has been awarded a summer fellowship award from the Parkinson's Disease Foundation. These $3,000 grants are used to support students in their research of causes and possible treatments for Parkinson's disease.

People with Parkinson's disease swing their arms asymmetrically -- one arm swings less than the other -- when walking. This unusual movement is easily detected early when drugs and other interventions may help slow the disease, according to Penn State researchers who used inexpensive accelerometers on the arms of Parkinson's disease patients to measure arm swing.

"Parkinson's Disease: New and Emerging Treatments" is a workshop for patients and caregivers. Presented from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 15, at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in the University Conference Center, the workshop is designed especially for Parkinson's patients, their family members and friends to learn about the latest treatments and how patients can help find a cure.

Parkinson's disease is a common neurological disorder in the elderly, and the number of affected people is expected to increase as the population ages over the next decades. The most common primary symptoms of Parkinson's disease include shakes of the hands, arms, legs and jaw; stiffness of the limbs and trunk; slowness of movement; and impaired balance and coordination. The symptoms vary from patient to patient, and not everyone is affected by all of them, according to the latest edition of The Medical Minute, a service of the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

Irregular arm swings while walking could be an early sign of Parkinson's disease, according to neurologists who believe early detection may help physicians apply treatments to slow further brain cell damage until strategies to slow disease progression are available. Xuemei Huang, associate professor of neurology at Penn State Hershey College of Medicine, and her colleagues are studying gait, or the manner in which people walk, to understand the physical signs that might be a very early marker for the onset of the disease.

Deep brain stimulators are powerful devices that were developed to allow for the precise treatment of brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease or Essential Tremor in a minimally invasive, yet dramatic, way, according to the latest edition of The Medical Minute, a service of the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.